War: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2024

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

From 1914 to the present, between one hundred and eight million and one hundred sixty million people died in war. War between capitalist powers but also war between capitalist powers and socialist nations—Soviet bloc, Red China, the Third World—has produced mass human casualties. I’m a socialist who believes such forms of socialism were never really socialist. So-called “real existing socialism” has largely failed and we now live primarily in a capitalist world run by an international bourgeoisie.

According to the Left, war is only one of the many evils that capitalism causes. Genocide, exploitation, poverty, ableism, ageism, classism, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia—the list is long. When socialism is achieved—when the stateless, classless, global human community is attained—all the above evils of capitalism will disappear. Yeah, right! I’m a socialist, but I’m not an idiot. To illustrate the absurdity of that claim, let’s consider just the prevalence of war.

But first some Marxism.

The classic Renaissance periods of human history (Ancient/Medieval/Modern) was augmented by the Scottish Enlightenment model of human development (Hunting/Pastoral/Agricultural/Commercial Societies). Marx then propounded a stage theory of economic development where humanity passed through “modes of production,” each mode a combination of productive forces and social/technical relations of production. Beginning with classless primitive communism, class societies moved from ancient through feudal to capitalist stages, finally advancing to classless advanced communism. Each class-oriented mode of production is defined by how labor was organized, starting with the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, moving through serf-based feudalism, finally reaching capitalist societies reliant on workers. I consider this Marxist schema vulgar, riven with anomalies like the “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism,” and thus needs to be taken as descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Now let’s consider the mortality figures from a selection of wars throughout history.

The ancient Roman civil wars (Servile and Social) cost between 3 and 5 million lives. The feudal Chinese Three Kingdom War had a death toll of 36 to 40 million. The purely capitalist first World War produced over 40 million military and civilian casualties. The mixed capitalist/socialist second World War drestroyed between 70 and 85 million lives. But the winner is the rise of the Mongol Empire. The Mongol invasions/conquests of Asia and Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries combined various factors; aspects of “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism” (centralized state structure), feudalism (decentralized fief system), and ancient labor practices (enslavement of Turkish and Slavic peoples), resulting in subjugating almost 25% of the world’s inhabitants. Between 40 and 70 million people were slaughtered across Eurasia in a population loss that may have affected up to 11% of the world’s population. Besides gruesome military battles and sieges, the Mongols practiced wholesale massacres, intentional famines, forced migrations, crude biological warfare, genocide and androcide.

At least one billion humans have died in war throughout all of human history, and that figure could easily be doubled without exaggeration. The horrors of class-based human civilization with regard to warfare alone makes the allure—the utopian fantasy—of classless post-capitalist egalitarian communism obvious. Marx’s “mode of production” theory, in bookending class-based civilization with primitive communism and advanced communism, in turn fueled the primitivist myth that our Paleolithic ancestors were peaceful, ecological, goddess-worshipping hunter/gatherers uncorrupted by civilization and science. Put forward by John Zerzan and Paul Shepard, it simplistically reprises Romantic era fantasies of the primeval paradise and the noble savage.

Marx and Engels asserted that Paleolithic humans existed in a state of “primitive communism,” a relatively classless, communalist social order of nomadic hunter/gatherer bands and tribes. These egalitarian societies practiced mutual exchange and resource sharing. Marshall Sahlins argues that such a social order was the original affluent society in which people worked as little as ten to twenty hours a week in order to survive. Such societies were affluent because their members were content with little in the material sense, enjoying more leisure and working less than did members of modern society. But when hunter/gatherer communities experienced environmental drought and famine they tended to become culturally/physically extinct.

Human beings existed for hundreds of thousands of years as nomadic tribal hunter/gatherer societies, “over 99 percent of the time that the genus Homo has existed on the planet, about two million years.” This primitive communism wasn’t a “utopia of basket-weaving peace lovers” (per Dean Burnett) by any stretch. Our early ancestors may not have engaged in the organized lethal violence we call warfare until they developed sedentary agricultural societies, but there is evidence that intergroup aggression often occurred between hunter/gatherer bands in the form of raids to steal foodstuffs and perhaps women. (Engels’ thesis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that primitive matriarchies were overthrown by patriarchal coups intent on securing male lineages for children is inaccurate. Apparently, women have often been considered “spoils.”) This includes observations that modern hunter/gatherers engage in ritual team fighting games to learn and exercise the coordination and motor skills needed for lethal raiding and warfare, suggesting there are elements of sport and pleasure to such homicidal behavior. Then and now, a particularly deadly raid against a small, culturally or ethnically distinct tribe might result in its complete annihilation. In other words, primitive genocide.

There are disputed theories that genocidal violence was used to wipe out the Neanderthals. More evidence of war exists for late Paleolithic massacres at Jebel Sahaba, Sudan, and Nataruk, Kenya, when scenes of human violence started to be depicted in cave paintings. Warfare seems to have begun in earnest with the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.

The problem with anthropological and archeological theories regarding Paleolithic warfare is that there’s virtually no physical evidence pro or con. To repeat, there’s almost no proof for or against primitive warfare. Those who find the lack of evidence an affirmation that hunter/gatherer societies were overwhelmingly peaceful dispute those researchers who would use ethnographic comparisons with historical or modern hunter/gatherer societies to speculatively fill in the gaps of prehistory, accusing the latter of cultural bias. Those who contend that egalitarian Paleolithic hunter/gatherers were peaceful argue that most lethal disputes were personal and directed toward particular individuals, not group versus group conflicts that amounted to raids and blood feuds if not low-level warfare. Hunter/gatherers, being mobile, tended to move to avoid threats and conflict. Only when natural disaster, resource scarcity, territorial impingement or overpopulation put stress on hunter/gatherer societies did they resort to intergroup aggression and killings which on occasion escalated into raids, blood feuds and warfare. To insist that nomadic hunter/gatherers were warlike is to postulate without proof, on gut instinct or from an agenda. Few scientists doubt that prehistoric humans were incapable of murder. What is in question was whether individual, personal killings could transmute into intergroup warfare. Absence of evidence unfortunately is not evidence of absence.

Marx postulated a basic human nature, what he called species-being. Humans are social animals. Their essence, their nature, is in reality “an ensemble of social relations.” To change the totality of social relations is to change that essence. And to change the mode of production is to change aspects of human nature. Some forms of social behavior—language, music, work, play, intoxication, transcendence—seem to have endured throughout human existence—history and prehistory. I’m afraid that war may be one of those persistent social relations, part of the social panoply that constitutes human nature even during Paleolithic times.

This also means that if and when capitalism is overthrown not all the social ills attributed to capitalism will necessarily be eliminated. I purposefully limited the discussion to war so that the whole range of evils (exploitation, racism, sexism, et al) associated with class societies will not also have to be considered. But if war is a fact of human nature, part of classless primitive communism, will war manifest through advanced classless communism? Certainly the countries practicing “real existing socialism” engaged in warfare with each other (USSR/China, China/Vietnam, Vietnam/Cambodia, etc). Then contemplate the war games practiced by the fictional ecological utopia in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia as a way to avoid war.

Whereas I like and love certain human beings individually, I fear and despise humanity collectively and in the abstract. Thus I reverse Dostoevsky’s literary observation. I’ve become more cynical of humanity the older I get. In a previous column discussing alien life and the Drake Equation, I mentioned the “Great Filter Hypothesis” as to why intelligent life might not naturally arise or sustain itself for any length of time. One possibility is that the evolution of intelligence cosmically might go hand in hand with self-destruction so that as life becomes more sentient it becomes more suicidal. Human history seems to bear out that hypothesis as we humans increasingly destroy our own species and the world.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
“Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx (1845)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels (1884)
Les hommes fossiles by M. Boule (1920)
“Social Stratification in Polynesia: a Study of Adaptive Variation in Culture” (1954) and “Stone Age Economics” (1974) by Marshall Sahlins
War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley (1996)
The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech (1999)
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller (2000)
How War Began: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Keith Otterbein (2004)
Reinvention of Primitive Society by Adam Kuper (2005)
The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory by Guilaine and Zammit (2005)
Constant Battles: Why We Fight by Le Blanc and Register (2013)
War, Peace, and Human Nature edited by Douglas P. Fry (2013)
“Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya” by M. Mirazón Lahr et al (Nature volume 529, 1-20-2016)
“Hominin interbreeding and the evolution of human variation” by Kwang Hyun Ko (Journal of Biological Research-Thessaloniki, 2016)
“Coalitional Play Fighting and the Evolution of Coalitional Intergroup Aggression” by Sugiyama, Mendoza, White & Sugiyama (Nature, 6-29-2018)
https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/long-live-war-whats-left-november-2009-mrr-319/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2021/12/01/alien-life-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-december-2021/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2022/07/01/left-of-the-left-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-july-2022/

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Apocalypse: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2023

I’ve lived through my share of apocalypses starting with the ur-apocalypse of nuclear war. We did duck-and-cover drills in elementary school and my parents converted a windowless back room into a slapdash fallout shelter. I remember at ten seeing the cover of the National Enquirer at a grocery checkout stand with “psychic” Jeane Dixon predicting that a planetary alignment would herald the end of the Earth. From 1962 on, predictions of the end of the world from fringe Christian religious types happened regularly—George Williams, Herbert Armstrong, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses among them. Combine these religious charlatans with the countercultural/New Age/new religious movement apocalyptarian grandstanding of murderous cultists—Jim Jones, Charles Manson—and you cover the first 20 odd years of my life. Comets have played prominently in apocalyptic dramas—Halley’s, Kohoutek and Hale-Bopp for instance. More recently, there’s the coincidental apocalypse of Y2K and how all the world’s computer systems might have ceased functioning along with the planet when the date changed from 1999 to 2000.

All of these “end of the world” scares occurred in a country that until recently was profoundly optimistic. America proclaimed itself the greatest country in the world, a land of freedom and opportunity bar none. Even my involvements in the counterculture and the New Left were from optimism, a sense of this country’s driving potential and its people’s boundless ingenuity. Yet I also witnessed the collapse of American New Deal liberalism and the rise of the Right, beginning with Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state under the slogan “Morning again in America. Prouder, stronger, better.” (Note: Nixon was America’s last “liberal” president.) What followed was an inexorable slide to the right through the second New Right, right-wing populism, neo-Nazism, the “countercultural” fascism of skinheads and the Abraxas group, ultimately reaching Trump and the third New Right. This was well after George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and George Wallace’s segregationist populism.

Let’s return to Y2K for a moment.

The Year 2000 Problem was an issue of coding potentially interacting with hardware, and of people praying that the double-ought two-digit date switchover would not confound and crash modern technological civilization as the fear at the time claimed. It piggybacked on a more esoteric chronological issue of the twentieth century (the 1900s) transitioning into the twenty-first century (the 2000s) as well the transition from the second to third millennium. Such century/millennium changes have always inspired millennial apocalyptic scares and movements so Y2K was just one more drama among scores of others, including Nostradamus, Jerry Falwell, the Nuwaubian Nation, Sun Myung Moon, and Edgar Casey. Except that for as long as millennial apocalyptic predictions have been around there’s been the common idiocy that they’ve been somehow triggered chronologically.

When we started categorizing things into BC and AD, or BCE and CE, we started dating things from the year 1. There was no year 0. The first century thus ran from year 1 to year 100, with the turn of the century occurring from the year 100 to the year 101. The same holds true for the first millennium, which started in the year 1 and ended in the year 1000, transitioning to the next millennium from the year 1000 to the year 1001. So the twentieth century and second millennium did not end on the last day of 1999 but on the last day of 2000, meaning the actual esoteric apocalypse should have occurred a year after Y2K. But of course, neither the apocalyptic predictions of faux spiritual/religious idiots nor Y2K hackers materialized.

Similar end-of-the-world sensibilities prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Called the fin de siècle (French for the end of the century), this turn of the century was understood to have been the end of one era and the beginning of another. Starting in the 1880’s the old era of Enlightenment liberalism, individualism, democracy and the Rights of Man gave way to a time of anxiety, malaise, distrust, pessimism, and decadence. Civilization was considered in crisis, requiring a total overhaul by a generation imbued with emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism in revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. This “fin de siècle, fin du monde” sentiment gave rise to Fascism which Roger Griffin summarized as “a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence. (“The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology,” 9-10-2008)

Sui generis during the fin de siècle, Fascism has become the terror of subsequent centuries.

There is an historical argument that the American revolution of 1776, far from being a “conservative revolution,” was actually a class war between a radical democratic majority and a conservative “republican” elite. The radical democratic majority won the first round and formed the Articles of Confederation of thirteen independent states that championed decentralization, a bill of rights, paper money, etc. The conservative “republican” elite of large landowners, merchants and slave holders staged a counterrevolution through the Constitution that centralized power in a Federal government and Alexander Hamilton’s financial regime favoring gold and a national bank. Everyone from Charles A. Beard to Robert Ovetz pushes this overly simplistic analysis.

A similar argument holds that FDR’s New Deal, far from being a stopgap attempt to prevent the United States from turning either Fascist or Communist during the Great Depression, was a genuine effort to form a welfare state just shy of European social democracy. I buy neither the “America’s original democratic revolution” nor the “New Deal social democracy” arguments. That one faction of American capitalists triumphed over another does not make American socialism an historical possibility. Let me repeat my above contention that with the steady demise of Democratic Party liberalism and the New Deal welfare state the United States has been moving relentlessly to the Right. What has changed is America’s unerring optimism.

The Penn Schoen Berland Poll of June 8-19, 2015 revealed Americans to be personally optimistic yet nationally pessimistic. If anything, this trend has broadened with a number of recent polls (PEW, Gallup, AP-NORC, etc) indicating that no matter their age, race, economic status or politics, Americans think most things are worse than they actually are. Spencer Sunshine recently analyzed a new wave of neo-Nazism that he argues is “a result of the robust state of the U.S. far right as a whole, which has been able to outlive the Trump presidency, continue to dominate the Republican Party, and keep energized and active.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns have been its most popular issues, and far right activists have taken over school boards, banned books from libraries and disrupted Drag Queen Story Hours. There is no doubt that the far right will only pick up steam as the election approaches, and especially if Trump is convicted. Within that movement there is always a militant edge, partly underground and partly on the street. Neo-Nazis have always positioned themselves as the hardest of the white supremacists, and their stress on hating Jews is in tune with the antisemitic propaganda that has flooded social media. (“A New Wave of Neo-Nazism Has Become Visible in Wake of Jacksonville Shooting” by Spencer Sunshine, Truthout, 9-9-2023)

Whether pessimism contributes to the demise of democracy or the rise of Fascism is debatable. I’ve certainly gotten more pessimistic as I’ve grown older. I don’t have high hopes that the rightward trend in American politics will be halted let alone reversed, nor do I consider a democratic socialism or a libertarian one on the horizon anytime soon. I’ve had a fascination with apocalypse most of my life but even the threat of that has wimped out. I coined the phrase “slow-motion apocalypse” well before the Grotus album of the same name. T.S. Eliot’s last lines of “The Hollow Men” have never felt more relevant: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

 

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Joseph Trumpeldor: the man and his legacy

This article is a follow-up to my Maximum Rocknroll column on Jewish socialism vs Jewish nationalism and should be considered a non-canonical column.

UTOPIA ATTEMPTED

I call them “horseshoe heroes.”

I consider the assertions of horseshoe theorists—that far left and far right closely resemble each other like the ends of a horseshoe—to be utterly bogus. Yet I acknowledge that a select few individuals have become icons simultaneously for both the Left and the Right. I’m not talking here about Keith Preston’s pan-secessionist idiocy which likes to claim that everyone from Mikhail Bakunin to Julius Evola are default “horseshoe heroes” and therefore “go beyond Left and Right.”  I’m instead pointing to the vagaries of Third Positionist figures like Juan Perón who managed to be embraced by the political Left and Right through their actions and ideas.

One such individual was the early socialist Zionist Joseph Trumpeldor who achieved the status of “horseshoe hero” long before Third Positionism was a thing. In the process, Trumpeldor’s death-in-action became the inspiration for elements of Labor Zionism to transcend their Jewish-based ethnic socialism into true international socialism. Finally, Joseph Trumpeldor and his legacy gave rise to the utopian myth that a true social Zionism might have transcended the political Zionism that prevailed. If political Zionism meant the colonization of Palestine by any means necessary to establish a Jewish State—Israel—social Zionism intended the communal settlement of Palestine/Israel as a non-state binational commonwealth, with autonomous federations of Arab and Jewish communities residing side by side.

Coded conspiracism: “What’s Left?” November 2018, MRR #426

I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.

George Carlin, “Euphemisms”

Sometimes a globalist is just a globalist.

paraphrase of fake Sigmund Freud quote

I grew up in the 1950s, in a “more innocent time.” It was a time when people didn’t curse, not openly that is. When I hit my thumb with a hammer in shop class, instead of shouting “Jesus Fucking Christ!,” I was told to say “Jiminy Cricket!” I envied my Polish-born dad who could let loose a string of Polish expletives whenever he injured himself.

Against But Not Anti: “What’s Left?” December 2017, MRR #415

I fancy myself a “citizen of the world,” but I’m merely a denizen of these United States of America. As such I feel obliged to oppose US imperialism and seek to dismantle the American empire. But that doesn’t make me an “anti-imperialist.” To quote Gilles Dauvé: “I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an ‘anti-imperialist’, since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.”

For me then, part of not being a dyed-in-the-wool vulgar Leninist anti-imperialist and opposing imperialism “objectively” everywhere is focusing primarily on my country’s imperialist exploitation and appropriation around the world. I really don’t spend much time and energy railing against, for instance, either Russian imperialism or Israeli imperialism.

Russia is a US rival and sometime enemy that has imperialized Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, etc., while Israel is a US ally and client state that has imperialized the West Bank and parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Those military and economic encroachments are only secondarily my concern as I am currently focused on US saber rattling in East Asia (Korea) and South America (Venezuela).

There can be extenuating circumstances of course. I am Polish by family origin so when Russia recently threatened Poland over the removal of WWII Soviet era statues I took notice. My wife is a Jewish “red diaper baby” and she has a consistent anti-Zionist take on Israel. But we don’t spend every minute of every hour of every day denouncing respectively Russian or Israeli imperialism.

What’s more, I suspect that my fellow American netizens who spend all their time and energy condemning Russian imperialism or Israeli imperialism have ulterior motives. In the case of Russia it’s Cold War anti-communism and in the case of Israel it’s old fashioned anti-semitism. Long associated with rightwing politics, anti-communism and anti-semitism are more and more products of the Left.

Anti-imperialism is one of those unifying principles common to Leftist organizations and movements. From the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program to more generic points of unity, an ideological laundry list is de rigueur for the Left. Classical anarchism remained largely aloof from this requirement until the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. The practice of formulating points of unity as a programmatic norm and organizing method eventually became part-and-parcel of anarchist organizations and movements generally as they incorporated elements of New Left and old Left politics, an argument post-left anarchists are fond of making. As for the ultraleft, we’ve tended to make each point in any list of basic positions a thorough treatise worthy of its own volume of Capital. Antifascism is yet another unifying Leftist principle.

We’d planned to go to Crissy Field to confront the Patriot Prayer fascists on August 26 when the whole Bay Area was mobilizing despite cancelled bus lines, locked down militarized neighborhoods, unnerving uncertainties, and real physical dangers. There was a lot of political pressure for the National Parks Department to cancel the permit, which didn’t happen, even as other similar provocations around the country were shut down. The overwhelming media coverage of the proposed event guaranteed that the Bay Area Left showed up in force on Saturday.

Other protest events had been planned nearby, such as the SF LovedUp Mobile Dance Counter-Rally just down the bay at Marina Green Park. And lots of folks thought the best strategy was to avoid Crissy Field altogether for symbolic anti-fash events elsewhere. Me, I think it’s always necessary to confront fascism directly. So when Patriot Prayer cancelled their rally the night before and it was clear Joey Gibson had flown the coop the morning of, I was relieved and elated, but also disappointed. Things had changed from directly confronting real live fascists to symbolically protesting the rise of fascism, and I’d done enough symbolic protesting during my last half century of leftist politics thank you. So while I was glad, I only briefly attended the largely celebratory demonstrations at Alamo Square and then the Castro, and I didn’t care to march down Market Street yet one more time. Truth be told, while I was happy San Francisco had repelled the fascists through our mobilization, the symbolic mass demonstrations that followed were a bit of a letdown.

Leave it to Berkeley to set the standard for directly confronting the fash, when a demonstration of 7,000 anti-fascist protesters marched on MLK/Civic Center Park, with 500 embedded black clad antifa overwhelming the police and taking over the park on Sunday, August 27.

I’d intended to demonstrate in San Francisco as an unaffiliated leftist against fascism, not as antifa. For one thing I’m 65 years old, take blood thinners, and have bad knees. I’d stopped the blood thinners days before in case I got hit upside the head by a rogue nazi. But I was there to demonstrate against, not to fight the fash, so I wasn’t going to be on the front lines. I admire antifa and their stated strategy to confront fascism everywhere with direct action. I post a lot of pro-antifa stuff on my facebook profile. But I also hold to a diversity of strategies (per Doug Henwood of The Nation), where “some of us are fighters, some of us organizers—and some of us like to write about history, theory, and the current conjuncture.” I was never good at the “boring hard slog of organizing” and I’m too old for “street-based politics.” So now I kibbitz from the sidelines and go to demonstrations and protest against fascism.

Notice I didn’t say I was antifascist. I have Gilles Dauvé’s reservations of liberal antifascism: “I am (and so is the proletariat) against fascism, be it in the form of Hitler or Le Pen. I am not an ‘anti-fascist’, since this is a political position regarding the fascist state or threat as a first and foremost enemy to be destroyed at all costs, i.e. siding with bourgeois democrats as a lesser evil, and postponing revolution until fascism is disposed of.” Antifa suffers from a similar political monomania, tempered only by it’s emphasis on direct action and it’s de facto anarchism.

And I have criticisms of antifa’s direct action and default anarchism as well. Militarily speaking the decentralized black bloc tactic might work well as cat-and-mouse with the cops, but it’s more like brutal gang warfare against alt.right paramilitary formations. It lacks the capacity to scale up to higher levels of organization, logistics, and mobility, so I think antifa needs to investigate other historic antifascist modes of self-defense such as militias and commando operations.

I have the usual ultraleft critique of anarchism, but for now I think that antifa’s implied goal of anarchism is so far removed from its tactics and strategy as to be useless. To understand my point, consider the goal of democratic socialism held by orthodox social democracy. To achieve that goal social democrats usually put forward parallel political party and labor union mass strategies out of which spring a myriad of tactics—education and propaganda, electioneering and organizing, shadow governments and mass strikes, etc. Rules of engagement are derived from one’s strategies and measures of success from the outcome of one’s tactics. By contrast, antifa has a single strategy—stop the fash—which produces limited tactics—education, doxxing, direct action. Strategy and tactics are so immediate and narrow as to have virtually no direct connection to any stated or implied goal of anarchism. Frankly, I don’t see how one leads to the other except for the usual @ cliché that antifa’s means and ends are identical.

I’m critical of anti-imperialism even while I’m against imperialism. I have criticisms of antifascism and antifa even while I’m against fascism. Similarly, I have problems with most anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist stances even while I’m against capitalism and colonialism. I like to think my political critiques are well-reasoned and not simply a product of my characteristic devil’s advocacy, my knee-jerk contrarianism expressed by Groucho Marx and the Ramones when they sang: “I’m against it!”

How Sweet It Isn’t: “What’s Left?” November 2017, MRR #414

It’s called “sweetening.”

It’s a certain type of background music and ambient sound for films and TV shows meant to enhance mood and emotion. It’s also called juicing, but it’s intended to be subtle, behind the scenes, muted. Sweetening is not supposed to be too obvious. For instance, when a live audience is recorded anywhere, a laugh track/canned heat track is frequently blended into the live audience track to amplify its effect, whether of laughter, clapping, booing, whatever.

The term has its origin in old-time radio, when sound effects like horses galloping, doors opening and closing, characters walking, gunshots, etc. were used to paint visual detail in a non-visual medium. Again, it’s not all dramatic sound effects. In films and TV shows, it’s not the sound of violent explosions or roaring monsters. The sweetening is in the sense of foreboding portended in the background music, or in the subsonic infrasound used to generate apprehension in the audience prior to some climactic scene. So while “sweetening” comes off good and positive, it might as well be called “shadowing” or “darkening,” depending on what effect the sound is intended to enhance.

As for political sweetening, two recent examples come to mind. The Tea Party ended up sweetening the Republican Party from the right, as did Bernie Sander’s “political revolution” the Democratic Party from the left. Both movements started as popular revolts against their respective party establishments and their mainstream politics, both helped rewrite their respective party platforms, and both moved the politics of those parties respectively to the right and left. Both threatened to break away to form independent third party efforts, both were blamed for the potential demise of their respective political parties, but both ultimately succumbed to political opportunism, cooptation, and marginalization. Or at least the Tea Party succumbed and wound up faking a hard-times protest movement, spawning affiliated get-rich-quick cottage industries, and successfully rebranding the GOP. Bernie’s “political revolution” has blended nicely into the much broader anti-Trump protest movement, so it remains vibrant and very much in the streets. Ideally, this popular resistance needs to avoid opportunism, cooptation, and marginalization, but that’s very difficult to do if the Tea Party is any indication.

What doesn’t count as political sweetening was Occupy Wall Street. OWS doesn’t count for much at all now, despite initially being praised by authors, artists, celebrities, politicians, and pundits as the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’ve never hidden my disdain for OWS. It may have personally changed lives like the bad brown acid circulating at a mediocre rock concert, but it was just a flash in the pan that changed little politically. So unless the inane consensus hand signals and annoying human microphone are included, no innovation of any consequence arose from OWS. That also covers the communizing “occupy everything, demand nothing” campus activism that emerged among protesting California students in 2011.

OWS ran with the franchise activism common nowadays, where an indistinct idea was widely disseminated and then taken up by local activists who made it their own through locally flavored community actions. The movement’s core idea, embodied in its name, was so nebulous in fact that it produced both the anarcho/ultraleft, black bloc, streetfighting Occupy Oakland, California, and the virulently antisemitic, conspiracy-theorist, ultraright Occupy Tallinn, Estonia, with every political combination in between. So while the majority of OWS-affiliated actions tended leftwing, liberal, and even anarchist, there was considerable involvement by rightwing, conservative, and even fascist elements. In this way, OWS displayed troubling Left/Right crossover politics similar to the anti-globalization movement which preceded it. This was not by chance but by design, given the decentralized, all-are-welcome nature of the movement’s organizing message. This was complemented by the ambiguous categories employed by OWS, most prominent being “the 99%” versus “the 1%.” This promoted an uncritical populism that studiously avoided any class-based analysis, but it denied any identity-based analysis as well, instead encouraging an amorphous, dumbed-down, Hardt/Negri-style notion of “the multitude.”

When finance capital comes to the fore, capitalism itself is in decline. Capitalism has abandoned industrial production for financial circulation, meaning that its profit-making comes not from surplus value transformed into capital but from mere exchange. For OWS then to focus its vague critique of capitalism on Wall Street and finance capital was to target a decaying economic system as if it were still robust, misinterpreting capitalism’s retreat as a faux advance. To see the enemy as attacking rather than as withdrawing was a delusion that badly skewed the tactics and strategy required to take on and defeat that enemy. If nothing else, this falsely portrayed finance capital as stronger and more powerful than it actually is, reinforcing the rightwing trope that “international bankers” rule the world. Excuse me, “banksters.” From this, it’s a half-step to the “international Jewish conspiracy for world domination” that is the ultra-right’s favorite meme.

Spencer Sunshine has written a detailed survey called “20 On The Right In Occupy” through the Political Research Associates think tank which provides thumbnail summaries of anti-Federal Reserve, antisemitic, white nationalist, fascist, and neo-Nazi individuals and groups involved in OWS. These strange right and left bedfellows in OWS are not so odd once we realize that antisemitism is also on the rise on the Left. Case in point, the post-Situ Adbusters Magazine from which the original OWS call came. From Kalle Lasn’s Adbuster article discussing fifty influential neoconservatives under the title “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” to Adbuster tweets that took up the alt.right’s outing of twitter users as Jewish by surrounding their names with parentheses, Left/Right crossover politics abound. Not that Adbuster’s leftist politics aren’t sketchy in so many other ways, what with their support of Israeli antisemite Gilad Atzmon and Italian conspiracy theorist Beppe Grillo. They do act as a political transition to the hard Left’s anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist ideologies, which too easily and too often become outright Left antisemitism.

Back to my point earlier, there are people who are not at all happy that Bernie’s “political revolution” has blended nicely into the much broader anti-Trump protest movement. These folks are the mainstream Democratic Party establishment liberals who blame Sanders and his “BernieBros” for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir had a wonderfully sarcastic takedown of their status quo recalcitrance awhile back:

But another running theme in Democratic Party apologetics informs all that, which is the ingrained desire to blame the left-wing resistance for anything that goes wrong — and to insist that it isn’t actually the left at all but sort of, kind of, the right. Hence Wolcott’s argument that the DudeBros and ‘purity progressives’ of the ‘alt-left’ are in some undisclosed manner closely related to the rebranded white supremacists of the alt-right. Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t like either of them.

To return to our central premise: The DudeBros ruined everything. Their workings are malicious, and marvelous. They are simultaneously clueless, puritanical and all-powerful. In between Ultimate Frisbee tournaments and Vampire Weekend marathons, they elected Donald Trump, wiped out the Democratic Party between the coasts, rioted against Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley and/or defected to the alt-right en masse. They develop apps whose functions remain mysterious, and that most of us don’t know how to use. Unforgivably, they made the Phish reunion possible, and now it will never stop.

Hence, conflating “terrorist” James Hodgkinson with “crazy” Jeremy Christian, or antifa “alt-left” with fascist alt-right.

The Democratic Party establishment wants the anti-Trump resistance to be a leftwing Tea Party, the energy, individuals, and organizations of which the party can exploit to win future elections, while ultimately domesticating, coopting, and marginalizing that resistance. They want the Left’s resistance to be the Democratic Party’s sweetening. This is exactly what we don’t want to happen if we want the anti-Trump resistance not to suffer the same fate as the Tea Party.

Of course, it’s much more complicated than “Bernie or Bust” versus the Democratic Party. Politics to the left of the Democratic Party also includes progressives, democratic socialists and social democrats, Leninists, and the black bloc anarcho/ultraleft. But it’s never been an equal playing field with the Democratic Party vis-à-vis the rest of the American Left. The Democrats are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Even decimated, at their lowest point in fifty years, the Democrats continue to wield vast power and influence. Which is why we need to prevent the vilification of the black bloc or the BernieBros or Jill Stein’s Greens or anyone else as a convenient scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s mistakes and woes. I’m not so naïve as to think what we need is a united or popular front; some mystical kumbaya circle jerk of leftist unity. But we don’t need the Democratic Party and its liberals running the show either.

Je Suis Charlie: “What’s Left?” March 2015, MRR #382

I woke up on Thursday morning, January 8, to learn of the massacre of twelve French individuals at the headquarters of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France, by two other French nationals, Muslims who claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This Al Qaeda affiliate which operates primarily in Yemen acknowledged that it had directed the Paris attack “as revenge for the honor” of the long-dead Prophet Muhammad, who had supposedly been blasphemed by the bandes dessinées of Charlie’s four famous cartoonists. Right away, I noticed that virtually all of the online stories and posts covering the bloody assault from major media outlets featured a video of the two masked gunmen fleeing their strike that looked severely edited. When I tracked down the original, full version of that video, it showed what was missing: the escaping gunmen wounding an unarmed policeman on the sidewalk outside Charlie Hebdo, then circling back to dispatch the policeman with a shot to the head as he lie begging for mercy.

This was just the most obvious example of media self-censorship in this incident, an act of squeamishness made more ironic by being contrasted in my mind to the regular cop-heavy American TV fare with its colossal—if fictitious—graphic body counts. Add to this the media outcry over the attack on “freedom of expression” that the Charlie Hebdo massacre is assumed to represent and the irony is complete.

Emily Greenhouse commented in Bloomberg (“What’s at stake in Europe’s response to Charlie Hebdo,” 1/8/15) on the “complicated cultural realities” across the continent as illustrated by France. Home to the largest Jewish minority in Europe, France also has the largest Muslim population in Europe. So, while French president Hollande proclaimed a nationwide battle against racism and anti-semitism in 2015, “[f]or all of France’s fine political abstractions, ethnic identity is inescapable. Everyone is obsessed with where everyone else comes from. The French government tells itself that it doesn’t ‘see’ or recognize race, so racism is impossible—but those are just words.” Holocaust denial, as well as overt anti-semitic hate speech, is illegal in France as well as the rest of western Europe, but this is not the case with anti-Muslim or anti-Arab hate speech. Using the case of the French government’s political harassment of comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala to illustrate the larger issue, Greenhouse writes: “It might upset some people that Dieudonné’s comedy—at the expense, some perceive, of Jews—is illegal, while Charlie Hebdo’s comedy—at the expense, some perceive, of Muslims—is not.”

Charlie Hebdo itself exemplified this contradiction by, on the one hand, firing a cartoonist in 2008 for making illegal anti-semitic comments while, on the other hand, regularly printing perfectly legal, nasty anti-Muslim cartoons. Jordan Weissman argued in Slate: “So Charlie Hebdo’s work was both courageous and often vile. […] We have to condemn obvious racism as loudly as we defend the right to engage in it.” Free speech absolutist Glenn Greenwald goes the step further in his column “In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons” on The Intercept website (1/9/15). “One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself.” Greenwald lays out this principle, which he heartily supports, while taking things to an extreme, which is his wont:
But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show ‘solidarity’ with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. ‘The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack,’ announced Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous satire.”
Greenwald then proceeds to reprint some vile Nazi/white supremacist anti-semitic cartoons, as well as some of Carlos Latuff’s more thoughtful, virulent anti-Zionist cartoons, in a tongue-in-cheek “solidarity.” This is plainly a case of “what is good for the goose is good for the gander,” to use an old cliché. Greenwald proceeds to lambast the suppression of ideas and the media’s self-censorship “out of fear (rather than a desire to avoid publishing gratuitously offensive material)” and argues that “there are all kinds of pernicious taboos in the west that result in self-censorship or compelled suppression of political ideas, from prosecution and imprisonment to career destruction: why is violence by Muslims the most menacing one?”

Glenn Greenwald excoriates unreflective calls for solidarity with Charlie Hebdo in order to bolster his defense of the right to express repellent ideas while condemning those ideas themselves. I do admire free speech absolutists like Greenwald, while not being one myself. One reason I am not is based on “fine political abstractions” like not believing in the concept of “rights.” Our “rights” cannot be guaranteed by some spook in the sky (God) or some piece of parchment (the Constitution’s Bill of Rights) or some fanciful state of nature (which seems in conflict with concurrent notions of “the survival of the fittest”). If we depend on the government to defend our “rights,” then what the government gives the government can certainly take away. And if we depend on ourselves, individually and collectively, to defend our “rights” through organization and action to advance our power, we come awfully close to declaring that “might is right.” The idea of “rights” then is sorely lacking in any intelligent foundation.

My main reason, however, is practical. If I belonged to a minority group, and some other group of people were organizing to massacre me and other members of my minority, I would do everything in my power to defend myself and my group to prevent being killed, including denying my attackers their free speech as a tool for organizing their attempt at genocide. In a previous column, I defended Vidal Sassoon’s history in joining the British 43 Group of Jewish war veterans in 1947 to streetfight against Oswald Mosley’s resurgent fascist Union Movement, with the 43 Group’s intent to bloody the Union Movement’s members, shatter its organization, and crush its social movement. Individual freedoms can never be absolute as they are invariably in conflict, with my freedom to stay alive in conflict with some fascist’s freedom to liquidate my commie pinko ass, for instance. If some Nazi scum were talking smack in preparation of wiping out me and my fellow Reds, I would not hesitate to shut them up to keep them from organizing and carrying through with their plans.

All of this is crucially important, what with the violence at Charlie Hebdo threatening to “fuel support for the far-right, anti-immigrant, xenophobic politics throughout Europe” and here in the United States, again according to Emily Greenhouse. James Neuger details many of the particulars of this supposed turn to the right in Europe, from the National Front in France to Germany’s Pegida, in his article “Europe’s Islam Debate Erupts as Paris Killers at Large” (Bloomberg News, 1-8-15). It is far too simplistic however to argue that Islamic terrorism feeds rightwing reaction, squeezing out “freedom of expression” in the middle. This is actually part of a broader polarization of European politics which sees the rise of more extreme politics on both Left and Right due to a number of factors, as correspondents from The Guardian/Observer sketched in “Across Europe disillusioned voters turn to outsiders for solutions” in November of last year. Listed are not just the National Front but also the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire in France, Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement in Italy, the ultra-left Syriza and ultra-right Golden Dawn in Greece, leftist German Die Linke as well as rightist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the rightwing Sweden Democrats and Norway’s Progress Party as well as the leftwing Feminist Initiative in Sweden and Danish Red-Green Alliance. Also discussed are Britain’s UKIP and BNP on the right and the pro-secessionist Scottish National Party, the rise of the Socialists and People Before Profit in Ireland alongside massive popular tax rebellions, and the left leaning Podemas Party that grew out of the indignados protests in Spain in 2011-12 in addition to regional secessionist movements such as the Republican Left of Catalonia. The Left’s anti-austerity and anti-globalization concerns are counterpointed by the Right’s anti-immigrant nationalism, with issues like anti-corruption and secession ranging across the typical Left/Right spectrum. But whether Left or Right, there are aspects to this “rise of insurgent parties across the continent,” to this anti-establishment, anti-EU upsurge, that mark a pause—if not a retreat—from the project of European integration.

How “freedom of expression” will fair through all of this is anyone’s guess.

BAY AREA CONFIDENTIAL…
When Tim Yo started me out with my own column, I was one of the original MRR news columnists. He wanted my column to be a study in three dot journalism a la Herb Caen, replete with snarky news items and snide bits of gossip. I took to the format like a fish to water, and ever since I’ve been a purveyor of snark and snide, news and gossip. Longtime readers remember I covered the incident when the East Bay BASTARD conference took umbrage with the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair for expanding to two days and overlapping one of their conference days. This caused a minor split in the local anarcho scene which produced, among other things, a second annual Anarchist Bookfair. So now there’s an overall Bay Area bookfair and an East Bay bookfair every year because, you know, old splits never die and besides, there can never be enough time or opportunity to sell anarchist merchandise to the kids.

The East Bay Anarchist Bookfair on December 14 of last year was a study in bucolic harmony where the lion lies down with the lamb, and AJODA folks staffed a table near one run by the Qilombo folks without incident. After the demise of Occupy Oakland, all of OO’s myriad tendencies (pacifist, insurrectionist, unionist, communizing, squatter, decolonialist, etc) were in the doldrums, depressed, at a loss for what to do and where to organize, and hence prone to sectarianism and infighting. The whole AJODA/Qilombo kerfuffle that I reported on last year was typical of the internal nastiness that the entire Bay Area anarcho scene was experiencing. The Left tends to form a firing squad, rifles facing inward, when they have nothing better to do. But with the death of Michael Brown, rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, the death of Eric Garner, and protests around the country, Bay Area anarchos are no longer inward looking and focused on fighting amongst themselves. They’re looking outward, enjoying an upsurge of demonstrations, protests, and riots almost daily across the Bay Area, and no longer battling against each other.

Suigetsukan Dojo’s Girl Army opted out of providing security for December 2014’s East Bay Anarchist Bookfair, so one of the organizers recruited a bunch of muay thai ruffians to help keep the peace. The verdict: the anarchist bookfair was so mellow it was boring. Just goes to show that it’s nice to have a common enemy in the police and the powers-that-be to generate some scene unity, even if that unity is faux and forced and flash-in-the-pan.